During an interview aired Friday night on Sean Hannity’s TV show, Donald Trump branched out beyond his simple commitment to birtherism as a political issue — and also advocated vigorously for another conspiracy theory regarding President Obama, alleging that Bill Ayers was the true author of Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams From My Father!
Trump has previously talked about this particular conspiracy theory. But in this case, it was on the most high-profile platform yet, in the form of a featured extended interview on Fox News. The long discredited theory has also been propagated by the right-wing web site World Net Daily, whose founder Joseph Farah claims to have been talking with Trump “quite a bit.”
During the Hannity interview, Hannity and Trump speculated that Obama’s real birth certificate might contain information he does not want the public to see, such as information stating that he was a Muslim. Trump then segued into questioning Obama’s whole background.
“Look, he was born ‘Barry Soetero.’ Somewhere along the line, he changed his name,” said Trump — referring to the surname of Obama’s mother’s second husband, Lolo Soetoro, whom she married four years after Obama was born. “I heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person.”
“You suspect Bill Ayers?” said Hannity.
“I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book,” Trump replied.
Trump also added during the discussion: “He was best friends with Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers was a super-genius. And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well recently, as you know last week, Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the book.”
“Barack Obama wouldn’t be president — and, you know, I wrote many best sellers, and also, number one bestsellers including The Art of the Deal. So I know something about writing. And I want to tell you, the guy that wrote the first book didn’t write the second book [The Audacity of Hope]. Obama made a big mistake when he wrote the second book. Because the second book was not Ernest Hemingway, it was about 37 classes below. So, the first book is Ernest Hemingway-plus. The second book was written by somebody that was much more average.”
Trump might be referring to how Ayers has responded multiple times to this conspiracy theory by joking that he did write the book — and wants some royalties.
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